The Bloomberg LP CEO will talk on Friday at the Northside Festival about how his failed bid to win the 2012 Games transformed his career and the cityscape.

Former Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff will discuss "A Field Guide to Failure" at Brooklyn's Northside Festival.

Daniel Doctoroff, the Bloomberg-era deputy mayor who brought New York the High Line and the No. 7 subway extension, is going to talk Friday about failure. That means he'll look at his unsuccessful effort to bring the 2012 Olympics to New York and how the lessons he learned can be applied to the tech community, where failing early and often has become a way to a) spin one's shortcomings into success stories or b) brag about one's successes while appearing humble.

Titled "A Field Guide to Failure," the talk will be part of Brooklyn's Northside Festival, an eight-day music and film extravaganza that has been expanding its "Innovation" section in recent years as it strives to become New York’s answer to Austin’s South by Southwest. In addition to talks like Mr. Doctoroff's, Innovation will showcase some 200 startups under a huge tent in Greenpoint’s McCarren Park, up from just 90 last year, according to Northside founder Scott Stedman. The festival kicks off Thursday.

It’s unlikely that Mr. Doctoroff will delve into his latest idea: that the city again compete to win the Olympics. The Bloomberg LP CEO has been credited with sparking discussions of a bid for the 2024 games that would involve a massive infrastructure project around the Sunnyside rail yards in Queens. A deck over the yards would support a stadium. The plan would also involve moving the Javits Center to Queens and redeveloping the current convention center site.

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When asked about it, Mr. Doctoroff declined to comment.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has shown interest in the project; Mayor Bill de Blasio has not. In a recent interview Mr. Doctoroff said his own role in the proposed effort "has been way overblown."

Though London won the right to host the 2012 Olympics, New York's bid led to dramatic changes in the cityscape: the extension of the No. 7 line, and the development of the Hudson Yards and the High Line chief among them. Mr. Doctoroff, a successful private equity investor when he first thought of pursuing the games, also got a taste of what it was to fail.

That taught him "the necessity to ignore the critics even when they are loud and often painful, and how you actually get over the fear of what other people think," he said. "[The bid] led me to Mike Bloomberg, which led me to [becoming] deputy mayor, which gave me the opportunity to reshape the city."

His talk will describe "9 or 10 different lessons" he learned from the experience that helped "guide my career, the way I think about life, and most importantly, guide Bloomberg," Mr. Doctoroff added. "Failures are never failures unless you let them be."